Glad I am not using FreeBSD

Posted Aug 21, 2024 15:50 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
In reply to: Glad I am not using FreeBSD by Cyberax
Parent article: FreeBSD considers Rust in the base system

Yeah, BDB.

Googling suggests FSFS came out in SVN 1.1, in 2004-09-29. Anyone burned by the BDB implementation in SVN was, obviously, going to wait a while to see how FSFS panned out before jumping in. At that point, the DSCM movement was already underway, with monotone and Darcs (evolving from Arch) in existence - giving further pause to anyone considering switching SCM to see how things would pan out. Less than 8 months later we got git (and mercurial soon after).

There was a window in 2002 to '03 or so when SVN looked like maybe it was the answer to "what should replace CVS?". But it was buggy. By the time you could FSFS was available and trustworthy, it was too late.

Glad I am not using FreeBSD

Posted Aug 22, 2024 7:18 UTC (Thu) by chris_se (subscriber, #99706) [Link] (1 responses)

I apparently got really lucky. I remember using SVN quite a lot in the early 2000's (starting ~2001 or so), and while the FSFS transition was nice because it was a lot faster than BDB, I never really had issues with the BDB backend (at least as far as I can recall 20 years after the fact).

Additionally, while git was started in 2005, I remember looking at it in early 2006 (or so) and was immediately put off, because the user interface back then was atrocious (IMHO). I don't remember exactly when, but I only looked at git again somewhere in 2008 or 2009, when the user interface had already gotten much better.

So I had at least 7 years of mostly good experiences with SVN back then. Now of course, in hindsight there are a lot of shortcomings in its design, and from the lens of today I'd probably characterize my experience working with SVN back then very differently. But at the time I didn't have that much to complain about. I definitely wouldn't want to go back from git.

I can definitely see the perspective you shared as to why you didn't seriously consider SVN as a successor to CVS for historic reasons. But I'm still confused as to the statement I replied to initially that CVS is slightly better than SVN (present tense). It might have been in 2003 when FSFS didn't yet exist (due to bugs in BDB), but nowadays?

Glad I am not using FreeBSD

Posted Aug 22, 2024 11:42 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

But I'm still confused as to the statement I replied to initially that CVS is slightly better than SVN (present tense).

AFAIR the main advantage of SVN compared to CVS was that SVN would let you rename directories.

I personally used SVN for a bit but then moved over to Arch and eventually to Mercurial (which IMHO is way underrated). At work these days we're using Git, but for me, that needs Magit to make it halfway bearable.